The Bestseller and the Blockbuster Mentality

The Bestseller and the Blockbuster Mentality McGowan, P. (2018). The Bestseller and the Blockbuster Mentality. In K. Curnutt (Ed.), American Literature in Transition, 1970-80 (pp. 210-225). (American Literature in Transition). Cambridge University Press. Published in: American Literature in Transition, 1970-80 Document Version: Peer reviewed version Queen's University Belfast - Research Portal: Link to publication record in Queen's University Belfast Research Portal Publisher rights Copyright 2018 Cambridge University Press. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Queen's University Belfast Research Portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The Research Portal is Queen's institutional repository that provides access to Queen's research output. Every effort has been made to ensure that content in the Research Portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable UK laws. If you discover content in the Research Portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact [email protected]. Download date:26. Sep. 2021 Chapter Twelve: The Bestseller and the Blockbuster Mentality Philip McGowan The 1970s was a decade of important cultural and literary interest in the history of the United States for manifold reasons: aside from the first attempted impeachment of a president in over a century, and the celebration of the nation’s bicentennial marked by events that ran from April 1975 to July 4, 1976, the American literary world underwent a transition of irrevocable proportions. The restructuring of the publishing industry into a handful of large multi-national corporations, and the effects that this had on the literary marketplace, were seismic developments the consequences of which would be seen for the rest of the 20th century. In literary circles the decade brought the debuts of Toni Morrison, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Richard Ford, but also mourned the passing of John Dos Passos (1970), Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore (both 1972), and Vladimir Nabokov, Anaïs Nin, and Robert Lowell (all 1977). The turbulence that characterized the Nixon White House or the intrigues on Southfork ranch on CBS-TV’s primetime soap opera Dallas also transferred to the world of publishing. A revolutionary transformation was underway that shifted the balance of sales power away from established authors connected to smaller publishers and toward a new breed of blockbuster writers who were contracted to, promoted by, and capitalized upon by the newly merged conglomerate publishing companies. The rise to global prominence of soon-to-be-established names such as Danielle Steel, Sidney Sheldon, and Stephen King as the most visible faces of the supremacy of mass-market paperback sales from the 1970s forward was rooted in the decade’s obsession with finding and selling the next big publishing phenomenon, be it a short-term bestseller or, better still, an unstoppable blockbuster. 1 The hyper-commodification of cultural outputs, and of fiction writing in particular, in the 1970s was the necessary corollary of a structure designed to find, and then maintain, a bestseller culture. To this end, a self-perpetuating system based on the commercial potential of a bestselling work needed to be created and continually updated with new titles and their spin-off marketing potential. To produce such a self-sustaining organism and make it viable over time, the publishing industry must decide in advance what it believes the public “taste” or (next) current trend to be, then markets that “fact” to the public that in turn buys what is sold to it in large chain bookstores, supermarkets and retail outlet subdivisions of the main conglomerate corporation. Of all tools available to it, the bestseller list immaculately encapsulates this corporate taxonomy in operation. “The self-fulfilling nature of the list thus comes from the fact that the reading public is constantly bombarded with information about, and opportunities and incentives to buy books on the list—and buy they do,” argues Laura J. Miller in relation to the pre-eminence of the New York Times bestseller list among other available records of reading trends.1 From the time The Bookman began producing monthly lists of fiction sales in 1895, an American interest in compiling, measuring and evaluating the success of a novel (and also non-fiction works such as cookery, etiquette, and crossword puzzle books) by the number of units sold was firmly established. The bestseller list is the most visible manifestation of an unfettered market in action and the ubiquitous nature of its role in late-19th- on through early-21st century culture is recognized in the proliferation of league tables and rankings for everything from local schools and hospitals to universities. Such lists matter because, basically, we are told that they do and, for the most part, we have accepted that premise without more rigorous scrutiny. Yet, bestseller lists—and particularly those of the 1970s—are intriguing documents of a culture in process. As Sarah Garland notes, “[w]hat we talk about when we talk about bestsellers is popular and commercial culture at its most noisy and dynamic.”2 The 1970s realigned the mainstream of U. S. publishing toward 2 the commodification of the novel form and the potential to make vast sums of money through the tie-in opportunities presented by “event” publishing. As noisy and dynamic times go, it was a raucous decade. Commodification, though, brings with it other pressures. The survival of the economically fittest may become the unspoken mantra of the system, yet knowing the sales figures of everything but not the distinction between the economic value of a text and its cultural significance creates an at best two-tier system rife with potential division. The aesthetic concerns of “serious” writing are pitted against purely financial payouts generated by typically derivative and formulaic novels that are everywhere for a moment and then, just as quickly, are gone to be replaced by the next mass-marketable title off the production line. As Fredric Jameson argues, [w]ith the elimination of an institutionalized social status for the cultural producer and the opening of the work of art itself to commodification, the older generic specifications are transformed into a brand-name system against which any authentic artistic expression must necessarily struggle. The older generic categories do not, for all that, die out, but persist in the half-life of the subliterary genres of mass culture, transformed into drugstore and airport paperback lines of gothics, mysteries, romances, bestsellers, and popular biographies.3 A bestseller, by definition, is a work that has sales potential over a specific, and usually limited, time period. As John Sutherland notes, not all paperbacks in the 1970s were destined for blockbuster status: “[u]p to 50 percent of all American paperbacks are reported to die on the shelf after an average of two weeks’ display life.”4 Not every paperback had the impact of 3 Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969), Peter Benchley’s Jaws (1974) or Alex Haley’s Roots (1976); nor were they expected to, and neither did they have the marketing campaign, movie or television serialization deal in hand at the time of publication. The longevity of a title’s popularity in the marketplace was not the primary focus of the publisher: cashing in on the cultural zeitgeist (itself the product of highly choreographed and intricate market forces) was the primary goal. For Jameson, and for Scott McCracken, previous understandings of the author-reader relationship are sacrificed in the culture of commodified production where “it is the image of the product, not the product itself that counts.”5 The novel as concept or as a vehicle for primarily commercial ends was replacing a more traditional understanding of the novel as a discrete, creative, and individual entity with a conservative print run in search of adulatory peer reviews. Event publishing in the 1970s capitalized both on the idea of a novel as sales weapon and its potential to participate in other markets beyond the purely book-based, whether in terms of merchandising, movie deals, or the production of sequels. As McCracken continues, “[t]he ability of the image of success to create more success suggests that in mass culture the popular text can cut loose from the conditions of its production and achieve a life of its own” (28). As an example of just such independence, the scale of the success of Peter Benchley’s Jaws was unprecedented, both in terms of a publishing phenomenon and as a watershed cinematic event. The hardback was the third bestselling novel of 1974 with 202,270 copies sold, while the paperback edition, timed to coincide with the release of the Steven Spielberg movie across theaters in the summer of 1975, brought in a further eight million sales.6 Moreover, the film adaptation topped the domestic grossing list with takings of $129,500,000, more than double the next highest grossing film of 1975, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with $60,000,000. Jaws is credited with “initiat[ing] the era of the Hollywood blockbuster,” earning $100,000,000 of its gross earnings within six months of its release proving, according 4 to Douglas Gomery, that “one film under careful guidance from its distributor, in this case Universal, could precipitate a national pop cultural ‘event,’ and make millions upon millions of dollars for a single studio with but a single film.”7 Blockbuster had become the hot and fashionable term in the studios of Hollywood as well as in the offices of mainstream American publishing, the two arenas in effect the paired and increasingly interdependent armatures of enormous conglomerate organizations.

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